We have known this since the beginning of the pandemic, but the data have come out loud and clear in the media these days and today it is trending topic.
Between January and May this year, according to mortality data from the National Institute of Statistics, 45,684 people died with Covid-19, 90% people over 75 years of age, most of them patients with associated comorbidities, while the data provided by the Ministry of Health were only 27,127 deaths due to this concept.
No less than a difference of 18,557 people in practically two months. And the Ministry of Health has not bothered to find out what is the cause of this spectacular increase in deaths in such a short space of time, if they are not caused by the pandemic. The boutade of the person in charge – political, not scientific The Ministry's long-awaited communication that there may have been an excess of traffic accidents is galling to anyone with ethical decency and vexatious to their relatives. A large proportion of these undiagnosed deaths are of those people who will have died left alone in their homes or those residents who were forbidden to be referred to hospitals. They had no right to be diagnosed, no right to be treated, no right to a dignified death, no right to a minimum of mourning and not even the right to be counted... Added to this is irreverence and contempt.
We are talking about a Coordination Centre for "health alerts and emergencies". Tremendous increase in exitus does not require the attention of the Alert and Emergency Centre.What does it do? Have there been an outbreak of a flu epidemic or a cold snap that has affected the elderly? Are they patients who could not be diagnosed or surgically treated in time and who have died for these reasons? Assessing these circumstances is essential to plan the health strategy for catastrophic scenarios.
There can be no question of such indifference. The general opinion is that it is simply a matter of concealing data so that the population does not realise that Spain is the European country with the highest mortality rate in this pandemic.
What is more, the aforementioned spokesman speaks dismissively in another case that a difference in the count of 3,000 "and some" more "does not change the magnitude of the risk". Firstly, the peak of several hundred deaths is derogatory. Secondly, to use Carlos Herrera's metaphor, I would say that this peak is like the successive catastrophe of several planes full of passengers that did not deserve the authorities' consideration.
Worse still is the insensitive commentary on this matter by the philosopher minister, with his characteristic disdain, that ".the deviation is very minor"topped off with a presumptuous comment that his performance proves that they are complying with the principles of transparency!
And life goes on just the same after this tried and tested concealment of deaths and their frivolous treatment...
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Eduardo Rodríguez Rovira
Honorary President of the Spanish Confederation of Organisations for the Elderly (CEOMA).